Live Review: The Amity Affliction

Just to clarify, this was for the Impericon Never Say Die Tour. I had researched all of the bands that were on the tour, but none of them appealed to me other than Amity. My expectations were therefore rather low for this show as a whole.

I was right in my low expectations. Despite turning up late just to catch the end of Cruel Hand as the show was running a little late. In all honesty, they were better than I anticipated but still weren’t exactly great!

After they finished (and another beer later), Being As An Ocean were up next. Their performance led to me and my gig crew to go upstairs and onto the balcony for the Download announcement on the Radio One Rock Show. Decent announcement, but still not enough to get me to go (yet!).

This passed enough time for us to go back inside and tackle Defeater. They were also better than I thought they would be, but still not the most enjoyable watch.

Onto the main reason you are here, The Amity Affliction. The crowd were unbelievable! Seriously giving it 100% throughout every song! Kudos if you were there.

The setlist was heavily weighted to the latest album (Let the Ocean Take Me) and very short for a headline set. The performance was okay, but they angered me.

The clean vocals had a lot of backing track. A lot of backing track, highlighted by the fact you can see the clean vocalist move away from the mic and the vocals do not change one bit. Shame really.

There was also backing track for the screaming, but I think this was more for backing vocals to really give them a strong sound. I can deal with this, but not having a full backing track for all the clean vocals.

An issue I have with Amity regardless of the backing track, is how similar all of the songs sound. The latest album just merges into one if you don’t pay attention to it. I love being able to listen to an album and time flies by, but with this one it flies by but it sounds like one extremely long song!

Conclusions

Rating: 6/10 (because the crowd were so into it!)

One line summary: Too much backing track!

Would you go again? Not to a headline show, but I wouldn’t mind them as a support.

Were you there? Feel free to give a comment below telling me what your thoughts are!